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In a nondescript building in the Los Angeles neighbourhood of Glendale, they’re keeping the magic safe. I can’t pass on the address. I can’t photograph the (blank) exterior, nor even the surrounding streets, and I certainly can’t tweet any images from the interior. I can’t use a pen inside, only pencil. I may want to bring a jumper, as the temperature is maintained at a cool, artefact-preserving 15C. If I want to touch anything, I have to wear white gloves. But actually, that’s not going to happen – no one touches anything, save the trained (and gloved) conservators. And just in case I feel tempted, there’s a warning, plastered on backlit display cases, from the little guy who started all this. “Attention! Original Artwork!” trumpet the signs over an image of Mickey Mouse and a paintbrush.

This is the Walt Disney Company’s Animation Research Library(ARL). It’s the top-secret home to 64 million pieces of artwork and production material, stretching back to foundational character Julius the Cat (1924), and soon to encompass work from the latest big-screen Disney venture, Frozen. From Snow White to Bambi to The Little Mermaid to Wreck-It Ralph and multiple points in between. That’s a lot of cartoonery, and a lot of history.

This 12,000sq ft facility used to be called The Morgue. “But this is not where artwork went to die,” explains one of my guides, so the name was changed. Now the ARL is a living, breathing resource that is available to all wings of the Disney empire. Putting on an exhibition in Australia? Reissuing an animation in cinemas? Researching vintage drawing techniques to give a new project a “classic Disney” undercurrent? You come to the ARL, where a project to digitise the company’s vast archives is ongoing and where the internal computer server is called Gems. That’s not an acronym; everything here is viewed as a gem.

And so the team behind the latest Disney release availed themselves of the ARL’s 24 staff and cornucopia of original pen and pencil drawings, animation cells and film reels. Next month sees the arrival of The Jungle Book on “Diamond Edition” Blu-ray. The loose 1967 adaptation of Rudyard Kipling’s short-story collection bristles with all sorts of bells and whistles and king-of-the-swingers excitement: an alternate ending, a deleted scene, something called “Disneypedia Junglemania”, and lots of extras besides.

Early sketches of characters from Disney's The Jungle Book, including the deleted Rocky the Rhino, far rightCredit:
DISNEY

“We provided some artwork a while back for Rocky the Rhino and Ticker the Tickworm,” says my ARL guide, referring to that deleted scene. Likening Rocky to the character in the Sylvester Stallone films, he adds that Ticker was akin to Burgess Meredith’s character; the faithful trainer who hovered around Rocky Balboa.

“Rocky was a short-sighted rhinoceros, and there were several sequences involving him,” British Disney historian Brian Sibley tells me. But as production on The Jungle Book neared completion, the big man himself made an executive call. “Walt Disney took the decision that no, this was one character and incident too many, so it was cut out of The Jungle Book when it was still in its development stage.”

The Jungle Book is a key Disney film for several reasons. From a simple entertainment point of view, it is one of the most enduring cartoons the company has made; a vivid, energetic, funny and touching fable – its robustness evidenced by the stage version that opened in Chicago this month, and by the recent announcement that Disney is developing a new live-action version (following a previous live-action version released in 1994).

The characters are decade-straddling classics: mancub Mowgli, lost as a baby in the Indian jungle; party-hearty bear Baloo; avuncular panther Bagheera (voiced by British actor Sebastian Cabot); hungry tiger Shere Khan (voiced by the great George Sanders); sinister snake Kaa. And the songs are among the best ever written for a Disney film: Oscar-nominated The Bare Necessities, I Wanna be Like You, Trust in Me, Colonel Hathi’s March.

But a lot was riding on the company’s 19th animated feature. In 1961, 101 Dalmations had been a huge box-office success, but the next film, The Sword in the Stone (1963), was not. Disney himself was concerned at this dip. As his company had diversified in the Fifties – into theme parks, television series, live-action films – he’d become less hands-on with the feature animations. But after the commercial disappointment of The Sword in the Stone, he resolved to keep a close eye on the next big-screen cartoon.

Disney had already OK’d an idea from Bill Peet, one of his long-standing animators and storymen, for an adaptation of Kipling’s book – he’d told the company’s all-powerful founder that the British author’s Raj-era tales offered a wealth of potential for Disney-friendly animal characters. But according to Sibley, when the boss came to read the script, “what he found was that the team headed up by Bill Peet had come up with quite a sombre, dark, serious story – much more serious than any films they’d done in animation since the days of Pinocchio”. An “alarmed” Disney had “a bit of a confrontation with Bill Peet”. The original story was junked and Peet duly left the studio in 1964.

Ever the perfectionist, Disney went back to scratch. He called in another vintage Disney storyman, Larry Clemmons, and a new team of creatives. His opening gambit was “to give a copy of Kipling’s book to Larry and his colleagues”, says Sibley. “Disney said, ‘the first thing I want you to do is not to read it!’ And they started working with the characters that Peet had created in his original treatment, but creating a much more upbeat, lively, freer, light-in-mood film.” Another casualty of this restart was the original score by songwriter Terry Gilkyson.

This was part of the Disney method: have the songs written very early in the film-making process. Says Sibley, “In Mary Poppins, for example, nearly all of the songs we now know were set down long before the final script was ever arrived at. They were decided upon as key points in the movie, around which the rest of the story would be fitted in.”

Only one of Gilkyson’s songs survived the cull: the Oscar-nominated The Bare Necessities. To fill the musical void, Disney called in the Sherman Brothers, Richard and Robert. They had worked for the Disney company since 1958, but had hit musical pay dirt with their songs for 1964’s Mary Poppins. That soundtrack won the Shermans two Academy Awards, and with Feed the Birds they created Disney’s personal favourite song.

Their compositions had a key core strength: they locked the action, and the viewers, into the characters. So the elephant troop sing Colonel Hathi’s March. It’s based on a military marching song, and amplifies the pachyderms’ anthropomorphic qualities; the number, in Sibley’s words, “summoned up this colonial feel of rather pompous [British] empire soldiers who don’t really know what they’re doing, which the characters turned into in the film”.

After my morning at the Animation Research Library, I visit another Disney facility. The Roy E Disney Animation Building is still secure but less incognito – a giant Mickey Mouse magician’s hat towers over the Burbank lot.

Inside, in the open-plan cafeteria, the man a Disney staffer refers to as “the maestro” is giving a lunchtime piano recital. Oscar-winning Richard Sherman, 85, and the surviving brother, is a dapper man in blazer, shiny shoes, pocket-square with cheerfully old-school entertainer mannerisms. He recounts the stories behind the Shermans’ compositions for The Jungle Book and Mary Poppins, before romping through them on the piano. What a treat to hear the man who co-wrote Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious perform it mere feet away.

Afterwards, I have an audience with this cinema and songwriting legend. One of the songs he and his brother wrote for The Jungle Book was That’s What Friends Are For. In the film it’s sung by four vultures. They have something like Liverpudlian accents, and sport conspicuous mop-tops. The Sherman Brothers’ idea was to have the Beatles sing the song. But it didn’t happen – either due, according to lore, to scheduling problems, or because a grumpy John Lennon declined.

“Yes, the second part of it is true,” Sherman fires back. “We thought it would be great to have the Beatles do it. And we wrote a quartet for them to do it. We attempted even to [write the song] in a rock style. And with the Beatles, John was running the show at the time, and he said [dismissively] ‘I don’t wanna do an animated film.’ Three years later they did Yellow Submarine, so you can see how things change.” But other contemporary – or near-contemporary – artists were more enthusiastic. The Dixieland swing of I Wanna be Like You was sung by celebrated jazzman Louis Prima. Phil Harris, the voice of Baloo, was another big jazz figure, a band leader and radio sidekick of Jack Benny.

And there’s another reason for The Jungle Book’s totemic status within the Disney canon. Disney died before the film was completed, in December 1966. The studio closed for a day – just the one – before production continued apace.

What, I ask Sherman, was Disney like? He agrees that he was a hard taskmaster, but also, “we were our own taskmasters. But Walt never pushed – what he did was, he put the bar up here,” he says, gesturing above his head, “and we said, ‘gee, that’s a little high.’ And he said, ‘you can do it.’ So you’d just reach up and do it. He gave us impossible assignments, but we just did it. He was a great leader.”

Early designs for Walt Disney's The Jungle BookCredit:
DISNEY

Back at the Animation Research Library, I get to see some of the products of those impossible assignments – original drawings from the making of The Jungle Book. A beautiful, coloured, mid-Sixties illustration credited to the “Background Artists” team features a giant paxidanus tree and the familiar figures of Mowgli and Bagheera. Not pictured: the painstaking hours it took to get to that point.

“We have Snow White as a blonde,” smiles ARL creative director Lella Smith, detailing some of the facility’s ultra-secret archive material, “a redhead, a brunette, tall, short, heavy-set, skinny – every way! But it’s all part of understanding what the character should look like.”

Next to The Jungle Book drawings are illustrations from the making of The Little Mermaid, which is also being reissued this summer. There is a picture of Ursula, the Sea Witch. Her look and shape and form, reveals Smith, resulted from a typically lengthy, rigorous process. In the end, the Disney magicians cracked it: Ursula would be a combination of an octopus and “Joan Collins in Dynasty”. Who knows what Uncle Walt would have made of that.